Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

Yet this idea that the sea is a jail — or, more precisely, that a sailor’s condition is the condition of a convict — is not a new one. Samuel Johnson had already expressed it in most memorable fashion: “No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned…. A man in a jail has more room, better food and commonly better company.”[8] But it must be said that, in Johnson’s time — and until not so long ago — life at sea was barbarous indeed. The catalogue of its miseries makes one shudder: stinking discomfort, inhumane crowdedness, permanent humidity, the heat and the cold, rats, vermin, mouldy and rotting food, brackish water, brutishness of the company, sadistic ferocity of the ship’s discipline, constant risk of breaking one’s neck or drowning when falling from a yard in heavy weather, danger of shipwreck, permanent menace of scurvy on long voyages, death after slow, hideous agony…

Johnson’s utterances on this subject do not merely reflect the prejudices of an eccentric genius who had no experience of the sea;[9] they were constantly confirmed by countless reliable witnesses, and it is quite impressive to note that, more than a century later, a writer as superbly qualified as Robert Louis Stevenson could state it again: life at sea is not liveable. After having explored the Pacific for six months on board a superb schooner he had chartered for this very purpose, he confessed in a letter to a friend: “And yet the sea is a horrible place, stupefying to the mind and poisonous to the temper; the sea, the motion, the lack of space, the cruel publicity, the villainous tinned foods, the sailors, the captain, the passengers — but you are amply repaid when you sight an island, and drop anchor in a new world.”[10]

Still, whenever Stevenson evokes the sea in his writings, he does it with convincing expressive power. Is it not precisely because his personal experience had freed him from the illusions and stereotypes that too often mar or adulterate the images of the sea offered by even some of the greatest writers? Think of Baudelaire, for instance. Baudelaire’s youthful seafaring adventure was less serious than is often assumed; he later drew some magnificent metaphors from the sea, but he also made bombastic statements, the hollowness of which make true seamen laugh. On his famous and grandiloquent apostrophe “ Homme libre, toujours tu chériras la mer! ” one is tempted to pour cold water, such as this description of a nasty squall by the great sailor Éric Tabarly: “… down below [on board Pen Duick II ] the drenched sails spill water everywhere: it is a fucking mess, but now is not the time for housekeeping. All through the night, in turns, I lie down, taking off my wet-weather gear, then putting it on again and climbing back on deck to reset the tension of the sheets to match the ceaseless wind-shifts. To the naïve dreamers who believe they will find freedom on the high seas, I have only this advice: look for it elsewhere!”[11]

Quite often, when sea lyricism flows on the written page, it is completely at odds with the author’s actual experiences on the water. One of the best examples of this divorce is provided by John Masefield’s Sea Fever (1902) — perhaps the most popular sea poem in the English language: “I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, / And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by…” etc.[12]

On each re-reading, this poem unfailingly delivers its impact with the humiliating efficiency of a punch to the stomach. But why is its wizardry of such dubious quality? When adolescent, Masefield had been sent to join a sail training ship. As he suffered from sea-sickness, he hated the experience, which lasted for a year or so, and it was to remain for him the most wretched period of his life. Once the ordeal was over, he swore never again to set foot on a boat and settled down as far inland as possible for the remainder of his days. Simultaneously, however, he shrewdly undertook a lyrical exploitation of his aborted maritime career, without disclosing its nauseous reality. This innocent trickery cost him a high price in aesthetic terms: his clever verses stand for all time as the ultimate example of nautical kitsch.

To the glib chatter of phony mariners, true sailors answer only with silence. It is as if the very gifts of imagination and expression that characterise writers, and the stolid virtues of self-control and sound judgement indispensable to seamen, were mutually exclusive. In his famous Typhoon , Joseph Conrad shows that it is Captain McWhirr’s very lack of imagination that enabled him to face unflinchingly the fury of wind and waves — and to save his ship. Yet, the danger once overcome, he could not even manage to communicate his experience: he wrote to his wife, but the letter was so long and boring that Mrs. McWhirr did not even bother to read it to the end.

Should we conclude that sea adventure is essentially an invention of landlubbers? One would be inclined to invoke here the ancient Daoist wisdom: “Those who know don’t speak; those who speak don’t know.” And the fact is, most sailors don’t have much to tell about the sea. It is simply their natural element; when at sea, they feel at home. One of the most colourful sea adventurers, Sir Francis Drake, summed it up with disarming and terse sincerity: “It is not that life ashore is distasteful to me. But life at sea is better.”[13] What can one add to that? On this topic, seamen always repeat the same thing. Thus, in one of his last essays, Conrad confessed: “The monotony of the sea is easier to bear than the boredom of the shore.”[14] And earlier on, in a short story (which, paradoxically, is a masterpiece of disturbing and suspenseful ambiguity), he described the feeling of peace and relief experienced by a sea captain who, after a long stay ashore, finds himself again with a good ship under his feet: “And suddenly I rejoiced in the great security of the sea, as compared with the unrest of the land, in my choice of that untempted life presenting no disquieting problems, invested with an elementary moral beauty by the absolute straightforwardness of its appeal and by the singleness of its purpose.”[15]

Between the eloquence of literary men (who talk about what they do not know) and the silence of sailors (who know but do not talk), there are fortunately a few sailors who decided to write — such as Conrad — and a few writers who learned to sail — such as Hilaire Belloc, whom I have not quoted yet but to whom I wish to leave the last word. The final page of his Cruise of the “Nona” expresses exactly the feelings that sustained me through the long years I spent working on this anthology:

The sea is the consolation of this our day, as it has been the consolation of the centuries. It is the companion and the receiver of men. It has moods for them to fill the storehouse of the mind, perils for trial, or even for an ending, and calms for the good emblem of death. There, on the sea, is a man nearest to his own making, and in communion with that from which he came, and to which he shall return. For the wise men of very long ago have said, and it is true, that out of salt water all things came. The sea is the matrix of creation, and we have the memory of it in our blood.

But far more than this is there in the sea. It presents, upon the greatest scale we mortals can bear, those not mortal powers that brought us into being. It is not only the symbol or the mirror, but especially it is the messenger of the Divine.

There, sailing the sea, we play every part of life: control, direction, effort, fate; and there can we test ourselves and know our state. All that which concerns the sea is profound and final. The sea provides visions, darknesses, revelations. The sea puts ever before us those twin faces of reality: greatness and certitude; greatness stretched almost to the edge of infinity (greatness in extent, greatness in changes not to be numbered), and the certitude of a level remaining for ever and standing upon the deeps. The sea has taken me to itself whenever I sought it and has given me relief from men. It has rendered remote the cares and the wastes of the land; for of all creatures that move and breathe upon the earth we of mankind are the fullest of sorrow. But the sea shall comfort us, and perpetually show us new things and assure us. It is the common sacrament of this world. May it be to others what it has been to me.[16]